Bottling Temps.

[JaffaMan]

Hi guys,
Just wondering what the coldest temp I can bottle my brew at, I thought I read somewhere that the brew should be around 20deg for bottling, but I dont bulk prime, I use sugar drops and put one sugar drop into each 345ml bottle.
I started to think the reason why you should bottle at 20deg would be to help dissolve the sugar while bulk priming, so if you just use sugar drops it should be okay to bottle the brew at say, 4deg onwards.
I've got a brew crash chilling ATM and wanted to bottle it tommorow, but havent had enough days at 3deg, so I didnt want to bring the temp up to 20 yet.
Oh yeah, I usually keep my bottles in a cupboard thats at about 20-25 degree to condition for 2 weeks after bottling.

 

[marksfish]

you can bottle cold i used to do it all the time before i started kegging.

 

[Cube]

You'll be right to bottle cold. I do. Just watch out for cracking the tap. I did my last brew inserting a warm bottling tube up into a really cold tap. It cracked it and when turned on beer shot everywhere.....

Luckily I had a spare fermenter so had to do a tap swap out. Lost a small amount of beer but meh....

 

[JaffaMan]

You'll be right to bottle cold. I do. Just watch out for cracking the tap. I did my last brew inserting a warm bottling tube up into a really cold tap. It cracked it and when turned on beer shot everywhere.....

Luckily I had a spare fermenter so had to do a tap swap out. Lost a small amount of beer but meh....

Damn, was it a plastic tap? how cold was it?

 

[JaffaMan]

Allright, I'll give it a crack, Instead of turning the fridge off tonight, I'll do it once I've taken the brew out tomorrow morning.
Thanks.

 

[manticle]

You can bottle at whatever temp you like. It's the carbonation temp you need to bring up to around 18 ish (for ale) so that the remaining yeast will stay awake enough to eat the priming sugar and produce fizz. If you leave your bottles at 4 degrees after bottling the beer will stay sweet and uncarbonated.

 

[The Scientist]

At different temps there are different ammounts of residual Co2 in your beer. If you bottle your beer at a colder temp it will have a greater ammount of Co2 in solution and once carbonated will have a greater volume of gas as opposed to a beer which was bottled at a warmer temp.

Mind you the variation is fairly small. Have a play around with the temp range on this carbonation calculator and you'll see what I mean:

http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/carbonation.html

Cheers,

TS

 

[glaab]

the variation don't look that small to me,..
125g @ 20C [19L] = 2.5 vols
125g @ 3C [19L] =3.2 vols

 

[The Scientist]

the variation don't look that small to me,..
125g @ 20C [19L] = 2.5 vols
125g @ 3C [19L] =3.2 vols

Yeah, if you are going to bulk prime looks like it'll make a fair difference. Not sure how accurate this calculator is though.

 

[rendo]

You'll be right to bottle cold. I do. Just watch out for cracking the tap. I did my last brew inserting a warm bottling tube up into a really cold tap. It cracked it and when turned on beer shot everywhere.....

Luckily I had a spare fermenter so had to do a tap swap out. Lost a small amount of beer but meh....

sounds a bit like that SUPER HOT & VERY WELL PROPORTIONED poor lady in your avatar...

 

[glaab]

Yeah, if you are going to bulk prime looks like it'll make a fair difference. Not sure how accurate this calculator is though.

the BS carb calculator gives the same numbers

 

[stm]

It depends whether (i) you have fermented at 20deg and then crash chilled after fermentation is complete, or (ii) you fermented at a low temp (lager temp, say) and then chilled further. If (i), then there is no difference because the beer cannot absorb more CO2 just by chilling it.

So only worry about the difference if you fermented and bottled at lower than the temp at which you'll be conditioning the bottles.

 

[Cube]

Damn, was it a plastic tap? how cold was it?

As cold as my fridge goes. 2 deg maybe. It was in there for a week and I now fridge my bottling tube over night just to make sure this dosent happen again. Obviously the temp differance from 2 c tap - 27 c tube was too much and affected the tolerances.

sounds a bit like that SUPER HOT & VERY WELL PROPORTIONED poor lady in your avatar...

MMMM...tolerances....

 

[WarmBeer]

Just re-iterating what stm said in the last post.

A very wise, and well-missed, man once wrote a very concise explanation of the effect of temperature during fermentation, as opposed to at time of bottling.

Here's the link to the article, have a good read of the section entitled "The long of it or; the more technical side" it explains everything.

 

[JaffaMan]

yeah sweet, this is the info I was after, thanks everyone.

 

[manticle]

Just re-iterating what stm said in the last post.

A very wise, and well-missed, man once wrote a very concise explanation of the effect of temperature during fermentation, as opposed to at time of bottling.

Here's the link to the article, have a good read of the section entitled "The long of it or; the more technical side" it explains everything.

That was my understanding too - that temps reached during primary were most important.

BTW Scientist - I use that calculator and it works fine for me. I remember checking out some others whn I first started bulk priming to make sure the figures given were at least in a similar ballpark.